Mar 5, 2025 06:50 PM
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/woke-...-al-Gharbi
EXCERPTS: What is woke, anyway? For the average pundit, it’s the pretension to a superior wisdom or a more fervent dedication in regard to racial and sexual justice. [...] An abundance of zeal and a lack of proportion have made woke—or identity politics, a roughly equivalent term—something between a laughingstock and a bugbear among the American public at large.
That is Woke 2.0—sanctimony, which is what pretty much everyone now means by the word. But there is, or was, another “woke,” Woke 1.0, of which the second is a sarcastic derivative, like “hippie” from “hip.” Woke 1.0 was in fact a kind of hipness: a genuine sensitivity to the multifarious ways ethnicity and gender can give rise to irritation or even conflict within groups or institutions. It just meant “smart about the briar patch of identity.”
So what does the title of this book, We Have Never Been Woke, mean? Have we never been Woke 1.0 or Woke 2.0? Neither, exactly. “We,” in this case, is not everyone, but “symbolic capitalists”: professionals and members of the intellectual/cultural/service/non-manufacturing economy, who (professedly) aspire to advance equality and social justice. They (we) have failed, and it’s our own fault:
The book’s main analytic category is “symbolic capital.” Symbolic capitalists are “professionals who traffic in symbols and rhetoric, images and narratives, data and analysis, ideas and abstractions, as opposed to workers engaged in manual forms of labor tied to goods and services.”
Not to be difficult, but why call them “symbolic capitalists” rather than “symbolic workers”? We don’t call factory workers “physical capitalists,” even though they work on and with physical capital.
There’s a vital difference, after all, between capitalists and workers: capitalists jointly own their society and control the livelihood of everyone in it (except the self-employed). Professionals who “traffic in symbols” control no one’s livelihood (except perhaps that of their immediate colleagues), and if they all marched into the sea tomorrow, capital would yawn and hire replacements.
Al-Gharbi insists, on the contrary, that symbolic capitalists are far more powerful than generally recognized. [...] These experts and administrators may be unaccountable to the public, but they are certainly accountable to the plutocrats above them, who set the framework of policy. Symbolic capitalists “shape the system in accordance with [their] own tastes and desires, independent of, and sometimes in conflict with, the preferences and priorities of super-elites.”
[...] Keen to demystify “popular” movements, al-Gharbi points to studies showing that participants in Occupy Wall Street and subsequent movements (the Women’s March, the March for Racial Justice, etc.) were “majority white…extremely well-educated…and overwhelmingly left-leaning.” This shows that those movements were not “broad-based.”
But most people in twenty-first-century America who can take time off from work at will without fearing for their jobs and who can easily find bail or legal help if they are arrested are young and white, college students or college-educated. Perhaps that’s why they’re the majority of people at most daytime or multi-day demonstrations. Working people, even if they can get off work, are often too tired to demonstrate, don’t know the lingo, and are understandably reluctant to get arrested... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPTS: What is woke, anyway? For the average pundit, it’s the pretension to a superior wisdom or a more fervent dedication in regard to racial and sexual justice. [...] An abundance of zeal and a lack of proportion have made woke—or identity politics, a roughly equivalent term—something between a laughingstock and a bugbear among the American public at large.
That is Woke 2.0—sanctimony, which is what pretty much everyone now means by the word. But there is, or was, another “woke,” Woke 1.0, of which the second is a sarcastic derivative, like “hippie” from “hip.” Woke 1.0 was in fact a kind of hipness: a genuine sensitivity to the multifarious ways ethnicity and gender can give rise to irritation or even conflict within groups or institutions. It just meant “smart about the briar patch of identity.”
So what does the title of this book, We Have Never Been Woke, mean? Have we never been Woke 1.0 or Woke 2.0? Neither, exactly. “We,” in this case, is not everyone, but “symbolic capitalists”: professionals and members of the intellectual/cultural/service/non-manufacturing economy, who (professedly) aspire to advance equality and social justice. They (we) have failed, and it’s our own fault:
The problem, in short, is not that symbolic capitalists are too woke, but that we’ve never been woke. The problem is not that causes like feminism, antiracism, or LGBTQ rights are “bad.” The problem is that, in the name of these very causes, symbolic capitalists regularly engage in behaviors that exploit, perpetuate, exacerbate, reinforce, and mystify inequalities—often to the detriment of the very people we purport to champion. And our sincere commitment to social justice lends an unearned and unfortunate sense of morality to these endeavors.
It seems, then, that the “woke” we have never been is something like “awake to the self-defeating (and self-aggrandizing) nature of our (purported) efforts toward justice.” We Have Never Been Woke, by the young sociologist Musa al-Gharbi, is a wake-up call.The book’s main analytic category is “symbolic capital.” Symbolic capitalists are “professionals who traffic in symbols and rhetoric, images and narratives, data and analysis, ideas and abstractions, as opposed to workers engaged in manual forms of labor tied to goods and services.”
Not to be difficult, but why call them “symbolic capitalists” rather than “symbolic workers”? We don’t call factory workers “physical capitalists,” even though they work on and with physical capital.
There’s a vital difference, after all, between capitalists and workers: capitalists jointly own their society and control the livelihood of everyone in it (except the self-employed). Professionals who “traffic in symbols” control no one’s livelihood (except perhaps that of their immediate colleagues), and if they all marched into the sea tomorrow, capital would yawn and hire replacements.
Al-Gharbi insists, on the contrary, that symbolic capitalists are far more powerful than generally recognized. [...] These experts and administrators may be unaccountable to the public, but they are certainly accountable to the plutocrats above them, who set the framework of policy. Symbolic capitalists “shape the system in accordance with [their] own tastes and desires, independent of, and sometimes in conflict with, the preferences and priorities of super-elites.”
[...] Keen to demystify “popular” movements, al-Gharbi points to studies showing that participants in Occupy Wall Street and subsequent movements (the Women’s March, the March for Racial Justice, etc.) were “majority white…extremely well-educated…and overwhelmingly left-leaning.” This shows that those movements were not “broad-based.”
But most people in twenty-first-century America who can take time off from work at will without fearing for their jobs and who can easily find bail or legal help if they are arrested are young and white, college students or college-educated. Perhaps that’s why they’re the majority of people at most daytime or multi-day demonstrations. Working people, even if they can get off work, are often too tired to demonstrate, don’t know the lingo, and are understandably reluctant to get arrested... (MORE - missing details)